First-Order and Second-Order Suffering

Alessandro Pinzani

In this paper I aim to discuss the complex relation between different forms of suffering that go from
the most intimate and individual ones to those shared within social groups (in this case: the poor). I
will first try to define suffering and discuss the relation between it and violence (1), intended not
only as physical or psychological violence, but also as epistemic violence and as epistemic
oppression. This latter concept will help discussing forms of suffering that can be deemed to be of
second order, since they are deeper forms of suffering that hinder that first-order suffering can be
really addressed (2). I will adopt different methods. In Part 1 I will use a phenomenological method
in describing the experience of first-order suffering and of violence. In part 2 I will refer to some
results of empirical social studies in order to build a hypothesis on the cause of second-order
suffering.

1. Suffering and Violence

Suffering is a basic human experience – one that defies any attempt at a definition precisely because
of its fundamental character (in this it is similar to pain and its opposite, pleasure). It cannot be
reduced to physical or psychological pain, although it more often than not implies both. When pain
crosses a critical threshold with regard to its intensity and duration (a threshold that varies from
person to person) and becomes so dominant to relegate to marginality any other experience, it
deserves the name of suffering. Even when it is felt as a physical, “embodied” experience, it is
always at the same time a psychological, mental experience; similarly, psychological suffering
“translates” often into bodily symptoms. In this sense, it is an experience that affects the whole
person and can be said to constitute the key to understanding the continuity between body and
mind. Even when it remains in the background, we are aware of its ghastly presence. It haunts our
everyday life, it hovers above our familiar environment, it cast its shadow on our actions, feelings
and states of mind. We may forget it for a moment, but only to feel it next with renewed force. Its
causes are the most diverse: the loss of a beloved person, a professional failure, a chronic physical
pain, or a generic sense of the futility of our life. Even when its causes are social, it remains a
personal experience, actually one of the most personal ever. Arthur and Joan Kleinman observe:
‘there is no single way to suffer; there is no timeless or spaceless universal shape to suffering. […]

1
Individuals do not suffer in the same way, any more than they live […] in the same way.’1 These
words remind us of the intrinsic peculiar character of suffering. It is peculiar with regard to the fact
that individuals who experience it do this in their personal way, and it is peculiar with regard to its
cultural representation and interpretation, which is specific for any given context (e.g. the suffering
of a religious martyr has a different meaning for the believers than the suffering of civilian
“casualties” for those who oppose war: in the first case the suffering experienced by the martyr is
trumped by the “prize” that awaits him in the afterlife, in the second case the civilian’s suffering is
held to be unacceptable and unjustifiable).
Its individual character makes it very difficult for those not involved to really understand the
suffering of other people. At best, one can grasp that they are suffering, but not how they are
feeling.2 Furthermore, people do not always show that they are suffering; sometimes they even try
to conceal it, so that it becomes almost impossible to recognize their pain. In this sense one could
distinguish a transparent suffering from an opaque suffering: while the former can be detected by
others, usually triggering a reaction on their part (they may try to help the suffering person or they
can simply feel touched and moved), the latter tends to remain hidden, without soliciting an answer
by other people (and this can possibly imply that the affected person will suffer longer and/or
deeper). But dissimulation or stoic bearing is not the only way in which suffering remains opaque: it
can be that its victims are not aware of some of its peculiar dimensions – particularly its social one.
In other words, they can experience it as their own private suffering, without seeing in it the
symptom or the manifestation of a wider, more general social problem.
Suffering is often considered to be unspeakable or at least to defy language. 3 As Arthur
Frank puts it: ‘Suffering is the unspeakable as opposed to what can be spoken; it is what remains
concealed, impossible to reveal; it remains in darkness, eluding illumination; and it is dread, beyond
what is tangible even if hurtful. […] At the core of suffering is the sense that something is
irreparably wrong with our lives.’4 It resists conceptualization, but it is not completely clear whether
this is something peculiar to suffering. If this resistance should be understood as the consequence of
its private character, that makes it inaccessible to others, the same could be said of love or any other
intimate feeling. They all should be seen as unspeakable and as resisting conceptualization (who
can really explain love in the sense of giving objective reasons why person X fell in love with

1
Arthur Kleinman and Joan Kleinman. “The Appeal of Experience; The Dismay of Images: Cultural Appropriations of
Suffering in Our Times.” In: Social Suffering, ed. Arthur Kleinman et al., Berkeley: University of California Press,
1997, p. 2.
2
This characteristic is commonly highlighted by modern philosophers like Hobbes, Smith and Hume, who consider it to
be a basic feature of individuality.
3
Iain Wilkinson, Suffering.A Sociological Introduction. Oxford: Polity Press, 2005, 16 ff.
4
Arthur Frank, “Can We Research Suffering?” Qualitative Health Research, 11 (3), 2001, 353-362.
2
person Y and not with person Z?).5 Rather than silence, it seems that suffering creates in its victims
a sense of impotence and passivity that faces them with two alternatives: either retiring themselves
into a self-imposed silence (for any word would only deepen their pain), or talking about their
experience in order to feel some relief, independently from the fact that their hearers do in fact
understand them and fully grasp or share their suffering (lovers – both happy and unhappy – tend to
choose this option and often talk a lot about their feelings).
When we say that suffering defies language, we mean rather that it tends to seem
meaningless to its victims, who therefore deem it impossible to conceptualize it. In this it is
different from pain, which can be sometimes seen as necessary to reach some superior goal (like
when one fasts to obtain some religious insight or to cleanse one’s body, or like when one submits
to some painful medical treatment to heal from a major ailment). Suffering can even be seen as
inspiring by artists or mystics, but artistic creation or religious revelation are mere consequences of
it (they do not reveal its roots), and the fact that the affected people or some observer attribute some
higher meaning to it represents rather a rationalization that aims either to explain how artistic
inspiration (or religious illumination) works or to extol the value of the art work (or of the spiritual
enlightenment) by highlighting the price paid by the artist (or by the religious person) in order to
reach it. In both cases, suffering is considered to be merely functional to achieving specific results
(artistic inspiration, religious revelation) and its meaning is superimposed ex post on the basis of
such results. Normally, though, suffering appears to be deprived of any positive meaning to those
who experience it. According to Wilkinson, it is bound with ‘an overwhelming and deeply
antagonistic sense of senselessness,’ so that ‘a vital part of “the problem of suffering”consists in a
compulsive struggle to reconstitute a positive meaning for self and society against the brute force of
events.’6 In other words, ‘the great discomfort and distress of this experience take places in a
desperate search for interpretation and understanding.’7 This search find expression in questions
such as: ‘Why am I suffering? Why me? Why so much?’8
There have always been, of course, attempts at answering these questions. The biblical book
of Job is a paradigmatic example of such attempts. Interestingly, Job’s desperate lament does not
receive an answer that gives proper meaning to his sufferings. God simply affirm his privilege to
impose suffering on his creatures because he has created them; for this reason, he expects and
openly demands full submission from Job. The latter’s plight has therefore no objective meaning

5
Even attempts at considering love from a merely physiological point of view, e.g. in neuroscience, can merely
describe what happens when a person falls in love, but cannot explain why she falls in love.
6
Wilkinson, Suffering, 11.
7
Wilkinson, Suffering, 42.
8
Ibidem. Wilkinson quotes also Paul Ricoeur, “Evil, a Challenge to Philosophy and Theology,” in Figuring the Sacred:
Religion, Narrative and Imagination. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1995, 249-261.
3
other than reassessing God’s arbitrary power on humans. Job has to accept his fate and bear it with
patience (a patience that has since then become idiomatic). A similar answer to the question of the
meaning of suffering can be found in Greek tragedy: also its heroes and heroines are expected to
show acceptance and submission to Fate or to the will of the Gods, even if they often claim their
innocence or piety (just as Job does) and clearly perceive their suffering as something unjustly
imposed on them without their fault.9 Other cultural traditions offer different answers: Indian
religions e.g. recur to the concept of karma in order to explain suffering in terms of a punishment
for past deeds (similar explanations can be found in other cultures too). This highlights once more
that the question of the meaning of suffering is answered differently in different cultural contexts, as
we claimed above.
Finally, suffering is experienced as something that disrupts the individuals’ life and
threatens both their personal and social world.10 The individual feels passive against it and rapidly
gains the impression that she or he cannot do anything to hold it. Suffering overcomes its victims
with brutality; even when it takes a long time to brew in the dark, it always catches them
unprepared. It comes to them with irresistible force and cause a shock that often leaves them
speechless, as we have seen. When individuals go through experiences of loss and mourning, of
illness and death, of physical and psychological harm, of bodily impairment and depression, they
have the impression that some external force is raging against them, smashing and shattering their
body and psyche. Suffering manifests itself as a violence done to its victims.
Violence characterizes our life and our being-in-the-world, but this does not mean that it is
always unavoidable, nor that it is omnipresent. We should never come to naturalize or accept it as
something normal. We should never surrender to it. By the same token, its “familiar” character, i.e.
the fact that it constitutes a phenomenon that everyone comes to experience with more or less
frequency during her or his life, cannot lead us to relativize it up to the point that we judge it to be
irrelevant. We have no reasons for coming to the conclusion that if everything is violence/violent,
then nothing is really violence/violent.
Like in the case of opaque suffering, there is in our life and in our society a hidden violence,
and the social critic has the task to let it emerge. To this end, violence needs to be qualified, so to
say. There is a natural, unavoidable violence like the one connected to both extremes of our life,

9
There is often a dispute between the hero or the heroin, on the one side, and, on the other, another figure or the choir
about the fact that the suffering might be the consequence of someone’s fault, even if it is another person, like in the
case of Oedipus’s father Laius who tried to “cheat” the oracle and so unwillingly helped its fulfillment.
10
“While it is clear that suffering takes place within the most intimate dramas of personal life, at the same time it
almost always encompasses attitudes and commitments that comprise our wider social being.” (Iain Wilkinson and
Arhtur Kleinman. A Passion for Society. How We Think about Human Suffering. Oakland: University of California
Press, 2016, p. 8).
4
namely the moment of birth and the moment of death. With birth we are put into this world and
exposed to its suffering and misery (but also to its joy and beauty);11 through death we are removed
from that world, and even if many persons come to cope with their death and to accept it, it remains
an act of violence against our body, if not our mind. In this first, natural sense, violence is
inextricably connected to human life.12As natural as birth and death might be, these phenomena can
be also caused by human-made violence. A birth can be the result of rape, of a forced marriage, of
an imposed pregnancy. A death can be the result of medical negligence, of lack of material
resources due to social injustice or to austerity policies,13and, of course, of plain killing.
There is also another kind of natural, unavoidable violence, namely the one resulting from
natural phenomena such as earthquakes, floods etc. However, here as well as in the case of birth and
death, we may be faced with the combined action of humans and nature: the flooding may be
caused by poor urban planning, the earthquake may be particularly calamitous because the available
anti-seismic technology was not used in the construction of buildings etc. In those cases, we may
claim that violence and the suffering it provokes are not unavoidable and not completely natural,
but also human-made. It is in such cases of human-made violence that we may affirm that the
suffering was unjust, that injustice was committed on the victims of violence.14 Nature in itself is of
course neither just nor unjust – only humans can assume these characteristics. The circumstance
that humans can “contribute” to natural violence occasionally blurs the boundaries between natural
and human-made violence. Sometimes it is virtually impossible to discern the human contribution
since it may lie far away in the past. In other cases, however, it is quite unproblematic to detect
purely human-made violence – both in the case of individuals and in the case of institutions.
Accordingly, one can speak of social violence, of social injustice, or of social causes of suffering.
Furthermore, there is violence in the world that surrounds us, insofar as it is the result of the
purposeful action of human beings. Manufactured things are the result of the negation of the
intrinsic value of natural objects (be they alive or not) in order to submit them to the satisfaction of
our needs. This represents in itself an unavoidable violence, since our survival depends on it; but
this process of nature’s submission to human necessities always runs the risk of becoming an end in

11
Kant observes in his Anthropology that the first cry of the baby can be seen as a cry of indignation for having being
brought into this world without having being asked (AA 07: 268 f. and 07: 337; see I. Kant, Practical Philosophy.
Translated by M. Gregor. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007, 369 and 423), but it can also be seen as
expressing the shock for having been torn out from the mother’s womb and its blissful, all-encompassing coziness.
12
On this topic see J. Clam, Aperceptions du présent. Théorie d’un aoujourd’hui par-delà la détresse. Paris: Ganse,
2010, p. 289 ff.
13
I do not need to point out the avoidably deaths caused by poverty; it is however worth noticing that the austerity
policy adopted by the Tory government after 2006 are considered to likely be responsible for over 100,000 deaths in the
United Kingdom, one of the richest countries on Earth (but also a country characterized by very high levels of economic
inequality). See Watkins J, Wulaningsih W, Da Zhou C, et al Effects of health and social care spending constraints on
mortality in England: a time trend analysis, BMJ Open, 2017;7:e017722. doi: 10.1136/bmjopen-2017-017722.
14
On this point see J. Shklar, Faces of Injustice. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990.
5
itself, with marginal results in terms of human flourishing, as it happens when the production of
goods serves primarily or exclusively the valorization of capital and only secondarily and
contingently the satisfaction of human needs. When manufactured things are produced as wares,
like in the prevailing capitalist system, they result from a double violence: of humans on nature and
of humans on humans. Environmental destruction as a result of the uncontrolled exploitation of
natural resources represents a form of man-made violence that affects both nature and humans,
becoming a prime cause of social suffering along with social injustice.15
Finally, there is a form of violence which is subtler and more difficult to be detected, namely
epistemic violence, which might lead to epistemic oppression. This brings me to the second part of
my paper. Before discussing epistemic violence, however, I would like to briefly discuss a concept
that is often connected to suffering and violence, namely vulnerability. As Judith Butler rightly
asserts, ‘suffering can yield an experience of humility, of vulnerability, of impressionability and
dependence.’16 The fact that we are faced at least with the possibility of violence in our everyday
life makes us feel vulnerable. This corresponds to the feeling of impotence that falls upon us when
we are overcome by suffering. In this sense, vulnerability is a central feature of what it means to be
human. We could, therefore, talk of an ontological or existential vulnerability. On the other side, the
use of the term “vulnerability” to refer to social groups is questionable, because it seems to indicate
that these groups are subjected to violence as an inevitable consequence of being human. This is
insofar misleading as the violence they are subject to is mostly a man-made violence that depends
on the behavior of some social actor or on the way society is structured (e.g. on the way power and
wealth are distributed in society). From this point of view, their vulnerability is not existential, but
is the result of external factors on which they have not control, i.e. of social factors. The so-called
“socially vulnerable groups” are actually the victims of social injustice and systemic oppression.
Their alleged vulnerability has nothing to do with the existential vulnerability that characterizes our
lives. The poor are disproportionally subject to suffer under the violence of state agents, to be
exposed to illness and epidemics, to see their homes destroyed by natural catastrophes because they
are not considered to be proper rights-bearers by officials, because they have not the material
resources for living in a healthy environment or for accessing a functioning healthcare system, and
because they are forced to live in places that are more exposed to the fury of the elements or in
inadequate dwellings. Their condition is socially produced and should be labeled as marginalization

15
Environmental destruction actually deepens existing social injustices, since its effects affect poor countries and poor
people more severely and more often than wealthy nations and individuals (see E. Skoufias; M. Rabassa; S. Olivieri.
The poverty impacts of climate change: a review of the Evidence. Policy Research Working Paper 5622. Washington,
DC: World Bank, 2011).
16
Judit Butler. Precarious Life. The Power of Mourning and Violence. London: Verso, 2004, p. 149f.
6
or discrimination, not as vulnerability. 17 The use of the latter term is often expression of an attempt
at whitewashing, i.e. at presenting their situation as something natural or unavoidably human, so
denying its social roots. This is also part of the epistemic violence and oppression suffered by the
poor, which I will discuss in the next session.

2. Epistemic violence and epistemic oppression

As I mentioned before, sometimes people experience their suffering as being a strictly individual
matter and seem to be blind to its social character. The causes for this “blindness” or selective
perception of one’s own suffering are themselves social. In the first place, they can be of cultural
nature. Cultural representations and interpretations of suffering may represent hindrances for
detecting it (in a specific culture people might be discouraged to show openly that they are
suffering) or for understanding it (what provokes suffering within a specific culture might not cause
it within another). Some cultures may attribute a positive value to certain forms of suffering, while
other may consider them to be shameful – and this attitude may vary with time within the same
society. Poverty, for instance, was considered in medieval Europe a pitiful condition that should
elicit a charitable reaction on part of the non-poor; according to the Christian doctrine, which
dominated society at that time, the poor played a significant social role by enabling people to exert
charity and therefore to fulfill their duty of good Christians; furthermore, the poor were considered
to be closer to God than the rich, whose wealth was seen with suspicious eyes, since it could
mislead them easily to sin and to eternal damnation; in other words, in medieval Christian Europe
poverty, although considered a wretched condition, was not thought of as a situation that should
provoke shame and guilt in those who lived in it.18 Things changed with the Reform and the
prevailing of an interpretation of earthily wealth as a sign of God’s benevolence and as a
premonition of future heavenly beatitude; correspondingly, poverty began to be considered to be the
punishment for previous sins or as a sign of God’s wrath, and the poor were therefore labeled as
sinners; one started holding the poor responsible for their situation and to attribute their poverty to
their alleged viciousness, laziness, stupidity and weakness of character. Poverty became a shameful
condition, because it proved the moral wretchedness and personal flaws of the individuals who
lived in it.19 The anti-rich rhetoric of the Middle Age was substituted by an anti-poor rhetoric that at

17
On this point I disagree from Butler, who claims that ‘we cannot understand vulnerability as a deprivation’ (Butler,
Precarious Life, p. 31). This might be the case with what I called existential vulnerability, but it certainly does not apply
to what is usually called social vulnerability.
18
See Bronislaw Geremek. Poverty. A History. Oxford: Blackwell, 1994.
19
See Gertrud Himmelfarb, The Idea of Poverty. England in the Early Industrial Age. New York: Alfred Knopf 1984;
Margaret Somers and Fred Block, “From Poverty to Perversity: Ideas, Markets, and Institutions over 200 Years of
Welfare Debate,” American Sociological Review. 70 (2005): 270-287.
7
the same time served to justify economic, social and political inequality within society and to deny
that the poor had a right to be helped by the state (or by their co-citizens). They were abandoned to
private charity, which was granted only to the “deserving poor,” adding another humiliation to their
plight.
The very ways in which poverty has been seen and differently interpreted in time have
influenced the way it was perceived and experienced by the poor themselves: to the suffering
provoked by material want supervened the suffering caused by humiliation, shame and guilt, which
arose from the idea that one is responsible for one’s own situation and therefore deserve to suffer if
one does not amend and change one’s way of life.20 This leads firstly to the rationalization of
poverty, which is not seen any longer as a social, but as an individual problem, so that its solution is
not to be expected through the action of society but through the personal initiative of the poor
themselves; and it leads further to the internalization of the stigma connected to poverty, adding
suffering to suffering and making it very difficult for the poor to claim for their rights or to demand
that society helps them to come out from their situation. In this case, they experience suffering, but
do not experience injustice and do not see their suffering as having a social dimension: its causes
remain opaque to them. This makes it impossible for them to address the real causes of their
situation. It represents, therefore, a second-order suffering that hinders the fight against the causes
of the first-order suffering (in this case: of poverty).21
For social critics, opaque suffering is not only as important as transparent suffering when it
comes to elaborate a critical analysis of society; it is even more relevant from a methodological
point of view, since it allows diagnosing forms of domination that might not be immediately
perceivable even to those who are their victims. In the abovementioned case of poverty, one has to
do not only with the open suffering provoked by material deprivation, but also with subtler forms of
suffering provoked by the social and moral stigma attached to poverty by the dominant anti-poor
rhetoric and by what can be called epistemic violence. This kind of violence is not always easy to
be detected, not even when social scientists face it in their research. In order to explain this
difficulty, I shall recur to a concrete example connected to poverty studies.
The social investigation of poverty faces a major problem: it is forced to take as its source of
knowledge the depositions of individuals whose epistemic reliability it tends to question or even to
deny. The social scientist is aware that the poor do not give evidence on their situation from the

20
See Robert Walker. The Shame of Poverty. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014.
21
I adopt this terminology thinking of what Christopher Zurn has deemed second-order disorders in order to refer to
those deeper phenomena (see Christopher Zurn. “Social Pathologies as Second-Order Disorders,” in D. Petherbridge
(ed.), Axel Honneth: Critical Essays, Leiden: Brill, 2011, 345-370.),
8
objective standpoint of an impartial observer.22 They refer to their subjective experience, that is, to
the way they experience their poverty. In doing so, however, more often than not they adopt a
language that is not their own and that reflects rather those assumed by the socially dominant view
on poverty. During some field researches on the life of poor Brazilian women, my sociologist
colleague Walquíria Leão Rego and I were puzzled by the discrepancy between, on the one side, the
way in which the person we interviewed talked us about their plights, giving voice to their suffering
and, on the other, the way they tended to explain their situation, usually blaming themselves. In
order to understand this phenomenon, I would like to recur first to Miranda Fricker’s concept of
epistemic oppression23 and, second, I will refer briefly to Gramsci’s concept of hegemony.
In a first attempt at roughly defining epistemic oppression, Fricker references the fact that
‘the powerful have some sort of unfair advantage’ over the powerless ‘in “structuring” our
understandings of the social world.’24 In doing so she mobilises vague, generic categories (the
powerful, the powerless) that need some clearer definition.25 Individuals have a plural,
intersectional identity and can belong to different social groups. They might face their social world
in different ways according to which aspect of their identity is more affected by a specific
experience (their ethnicity, their gender, their sexual orientation, their social status, etc.). On the
other hand, notwithstanding the intersectional character of the personal identity developed by the
members of society, one can identify specific social experiences that are shared by those who
belong to a specific group, for example, the racial discrimination suffered by black people
independently from their gender or social position. This is not tantamount to claiming that they
share the same social experience. As Fricker points out with reference to the feminine standpoint, ‘it
need only depend on the idea that some of women’s social experiences have similarities in virtue of
their subjects being women.’26 This allows us to define the standpoint of a specific social group
without falling into the opposite mistakes of either assuming an essentialist concept of it (as if there
might exist something like a feminine nature opposed to the masculine) or denying the possibility of
identifying a common experience shared by the members of the group (as if every social experience
were essentially individual in its character and could not possibly lead to any kind of
generalization). Against this view, Fricker claims that it is possible to circumscribe social

22
Of course, one could object that almost nobody is able to assume such a standpoint; but the poor appear to be less
likely to do it for reasons that shall be explained below.
23
Miranda Fricker. ‘Epistemic Oppression and Epistemic Privilege’, Canadian Journal of Philosophy, 29, 1999, 191-
210; Id. Epistemic Injustice. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007.
24
Fricker, Epistemic Oppression…, p. 191.
25
This vagueness echoes the way in which Howard Becker in his famous essay “Whose Side are We On?” distinguishes
between subordinate and superordinate parties (Howard S. Becker. ‘Whose Side Are We On?’, Social Problems, 14(3),
1967, 239-247).
26
Fricker, Epistemic Oppression…, p. 201.
9
experiences (e.g. experiences of discrimination or silencing) that are similarly lived by members of
a social group. This allows us to identify the specific standpoint of that group despite the individual
differences among its members. It should be possible therefore to talk of the social experience of
the poor notwithstanding the fact that poor individuals differ from each other in many respects.
From this point of view, it is possible then to speak of the standpoint of the poor as opposed to the
standpoint of economically and socially privileged groups of a specific society, so that the
categories of ‘powerful’ and ‘powerless’ become less vague.27
It is now possible to claim that the standpoint of the poor is marginalised in the sense that
the poor’s social experiences are not deemed relevant in order to understand how a specific society
is structured. It is rather the standpoint of more privileged groups that is considered to represent an
objective or even a ‘true’ interpretation of the social world. These groups need not be represented
by the highest echelon of the social ladder, by the wealthiest strata of society. More often than not
all groups that gain advantages from present social arrangements (from the economic elite to the
lower-middle class) tend to share a number of beliefs, values and social practices that can be seen as
forming a specific standpoint through which they see and experience their social world. In taking
this standpoint, they marginalise and disqualify alternative standpoints; that is, they negate the
relevance of the social experience of those who suffer under present social arrangements. This
hermeneutic discrimination can affect the poor for no other reason than their being poor and can be
therefore called hermeneutic injustice. Hermeneutic injustice becomes epistemic injustice when, by
silencing the social experiences of specific social groups, it hinders our ability to gain knowledge of
society. This is, for instance, the case when poverty is reduced to a lack of material resources and
explained by the poor’s alleged lack of initiative, education or intelligence. This prejudiced view
prevents us from having a more realistic view of society. When a group ‘suffers epistemic injustice
in a systematic way, then it will be appropriate to talk of epistemic oppression,’ as Fricker
remarks, 28 and it is undeniable that the poor suffer such oppression. Actually, one could even talk of
epistemic domination, since they often lack the capacity to articulate an alternative epistemic
standpoint. To epistemic domination corresponds of course an ‘epistemic advantage’ for the
‘powerful.’29 Their standpoint is considered to offer the only legitimate view of society, so that their
narrative becomes the only acceptable one and ends up being accepted also by the ‘powerless,’ even
though it might go against their personal experience. This happens mostly when the privileged
standpoint is incessantly repeated in the political arena by dominant parties and by governing
politicians as well as in the public sphere by mass media that uncritically accepts it. This happens,

27
The same of course can be said of Becker’s categories of subordinate and superordinate parties.
28
Fricker, Epistemic Oppression…, p. 208.
29
Ibidem.
10
for instance, in Brazil with Rede Globo and the other commercial broadcasting and publishing
corporations that dominate the market in the absence of an effective public broadcast corporation.30
This is not tantamount to claiming that the Brazilian media wilfully spread an ideological view that
blames the poor, although this may well be the case up to a certain point. I would rather assume that
we face here an epistemic bias.
Social groups may have an epistemic bias that leads them not to see social injustice in their
society. This is not a form of cynicism or an ideological attempt to conceal the real power relation;
rather it shows a certain inability to grasp how their society is actually structured and how its
institutions reproduce social injustice. When middle-class Brazilians blame the poor for their own
poverty and see the poor’s alleged laziness, lack of intelligence or sheer irresponsibility as its main
causes, they are not necessarily being cynical. They are simply judging the poor’s situation by using
the same parameters they use to judge their own lives, that is, individual responsibility and
individual merit. Of course, they are wrong in applying these parameters to themselves in the first
place, for individual autonomy is actually the result of external social factors on which individuals
have hardly any influence, particularly when it comes to the conditions under which they are born
(which social class, which social group, which family, etc.) and under which they have been
educated. Further, they are also wrong because they think it is legitimate to judge someone’s social
position or economic condition simply by looking at their individual choices and actions without
taking into account the social context in which those choices and courses of action were pursued.
They do not seem to consider the role of family, social groups, education, etc. in which those
individuals happen to live (not by choice, nota bene).
On the other side, this epistemic bias regarding how to evaluate one’s life, has for the
middle-class the positive effect of justifying in their eyes their own privileged position, which they
do not attribute to the social conditions under which they have come to the world, but exclusively to
their individual merit. It is then easy to see how this epistemic bias crystallizes in a view of social
reality that justifies the status quo they profit from. It is at this point that this specific standpoint (the
privileged standpoint) is presented to society as a whole as the only valid one and becomes
hegemonic.
As it is well known, hegemony is an ambiguous concept. Gramsci uses it in different
contexts and with reference to different phenomena.31 For our purpose, it suffices to say that,

30
On the dominant view on poverty and the poor in Brazil see Lena Lavinas (ed.). Percepções sobre desigualdade e
pobreza. O que pensam os brasileiros da política social?. Rio de Janeiro: Centro Internacional Celso Furtado, 2014 and
Mani Tebet A. Marins. Bolsa Família. Questões de gênero e moralidades. Rio de Janeiro: Editora da UFRJ, 2017.
31
Antonio Gramsci. Prison Notebooks. Volume I. New York: Columbia University Press, 1992; Id. Prison Notebooks.
Volume II. New York: Columbia University Press, 1996. According to Gramsci, “hegemony” can be “cultural,”
“intellectual,” “moral,” “social,” “political” or “economic;” the corresponding adjective “hegemonic” is applied to such
11
generally speaking, the concept refers to the way a social group conquers and exerts power – be it
social, political, economic or intellectual. One of its main mechanisms is to formulate a specific
view of society and of social relations that is presented as the only objective and true one, although
it represents a partial point of view in which, basically, the interests of the hegemonic class or
classes are presented as the general interests of society as a whole. 32 In order to impose this
standpoint on all other classes, different instruments are mobilized; academic discourses, school
curricula and mass media, however, play an eminent role in its spreading.33 In the case of Brazil, the
dominant narrative has remained basically unaltered through all the regime changes: from colony to
independent state, from monarchy to republic. It claims that society is naturally hierarchically
structured and that those on the bottom (i.e. slaves and, after abolition, which happened very late, in
1888, former slaves and their descendants) occupy their position because of their ethnical,
intellectual and moral inferiority. The narrative has been repeated for centuries in schools and
academia, newspaper columns and church pulpits, by politicians, preachers, and pundits.34 This
goes some way to explaining how racism became so ingrained in the dominant view of social reality
that most members of the dominant classes (the elite and the so-called middle-class)35 claim that
Brazilian society is not racist.36 The naturalization of racial, economic and social inequality (not to

heterogenous things such as “nation,” “position,” “point of view,” “apparat,” “action,” “system” etc. (see Giuseppe
Cospito. “Egemonia/egemonico nei Quaderni del carcere (e prima),”International Gramsci Journal, 2(1), 2016, p. 59).
32
Gramsci. Prison Notebooks. Vol. II, p. 179ff.
33
Gramsci Prison Notebooks. Vol. I, p. 152ff. and Id. Prison Notebooks. Vol. II, p. 199ff. One can observe this with the
so-called neoliberal revolution that allegedly took place in the 1980s. As a matter of fact, the ground for this momentous
shift in the social view that was dominant in Western capitalist countries was prepared through decades of patient,
incessant intellectual efforts by academics, journalists, politicians and pundits, whose history have been already told by
many authors (e.g. Pierre Bourdieu; Luc Boltanski. “La production de l’idéologie dominante.” Annales de la Recherche
Scientifique, 2-3, 1976, 4-73; Michel Foucault. The Birth of Biopolitics. Basinkstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008; Philip
Mirowski; Dieter Plehwe (eds.). The Road from Mount Pèlerin. The Making of the Neoliberal Thought Collective.
Cambridge (MA): Harvard University Press, 2009; Daniel Stedman Jones. Masters of the Universe. Hayek, Friedman,
and the Birth of Neoliberal Politics. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012). This shift happened often through
apparently neutral governmental decisions, like when the French government stopped building social housing and
started offering citizens low interest credit that it had dealt with private banks (Pierre Bourdieu. The Social Structures of
the Economy. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2005). In doing so, what was seen as a social right of citizens (the right to a
decent housing) became a matter of individual responsibility (citizens were allowed using the borrowed money to build
a house or a mansion, if they wanted, although this might involve their impossibility to payback their debt).
34
With regard to preachers, I would like to refer to the so-called “theology of prosperity,” which is widespread within
Pentecostal Evangelical churches and claims that God wants us to become rich and despises those who do not make the
corresponding effort.
35
What Brazilians call middle-class represent actually a small parcel of society and would be considered middle-high
class elsewhere. It is composed by free professionals and high rank public servants (judges, university professors,
bureaucrats etc.) and comprehend the fiscal classes A and B, although class A (formed by those, whose income is more
than ten times the legal minimum wage) includes also the billionaires and the economic elite (this gives to people
earning slightly more than 10.000 reais the illusion that they belong to the elite, whose monthly income measures in the
hundreds of thousand or in million).
36
When the Lula government introduced affirmative action policies for public universities, it was common to hear from
pundits and common people that it was such policies that created racism. Probably many made this claim in good faith.
This peculiar blindness toward racial issues found an ideological justification in Giberto Freyre’s concept of “racial
democracy” (Gilberto Freyre. The Masters and the Slaves. A Study in the Development of Brazilian Civilization. New
York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1964; the book was first published in Brazil in 1933).
12
mention the strong gender inequality that characterizes South American societies) is the result of the
hegemonic view according to which social positions are the result of the intellectual and moral
superiority of the better off and the corresponding inferiority of the worse off. In recent years, this
narrative has been partly substituted by a more neoliberal one, according to which social positions
are the result of individual merit. The latter view is only tepidly defended by the elite, since their
privileges are based mainly on inheritance and since most of its members are rentiers rather than
entrepreneurs. However, it is strongly present in the public discourse, from media to academia, and
it has also been internalized by the poor, particularly thank to the aggressive preaching of
Pentecostal churches that spread what is called “theology of prosperity,” according to which God
wants us to become rich and despises those who do not make any effort to this goal. Rich people
deserve therefore their wealth because they own it to their personal effort – a narrative that is
blatantly contrary to historical facts and socio-economic analyses.
There are of course differences in the way the hegemonic standpoint is de facto accepted and
internalised by the subordinate groups. There might be forms of resistance that manifest themselves
in different ways. These can take the form of what James C. Scott has called ‘hidden transcripts;’37
that is, they can result in a discourse that disallows the official one, but too often remains
circumscribed to small circles: to local communities, to friends and family, sometimes to the
individual herself. Or they can surface through attempts to expressly voice alternative standpoints
via independent media, social networks or forms of cultural expressions that have escaped the
mainstream mechanism of producing culture, information and entertainment (in Brazil this might be
the case with favela funk music). As important as they obviously are, these forms of resistance do
not however subvert the epistemic privilege of the standpoint of the powerful and its dominance
over the standpoint of the powerless. The latter therefore tend to remain under the spell of the
interpretation of their own situation offered by those who created it in the first place.
Of course, one could question whether and to which point the poor really incorporate the
dominant discourse into their own worldview and interiorize it so that they interpret their personal
experience according to it. The fact that the women we interviewed gave us the dominant
explanation when it came to discuss their situation could be a sort of reflective attitude that would
not resist to a deeper analysis. Or one could think that they were telling us what they imagined that
we expected to hear from them. On the other side, we heard the “standard” explanation from all the
interviewed persons, also in the cases in which we repeated the interviews a couple of times every
one or two years. In those cases, the women felt comfortable enough to tell us the most intimate

37
James C. Scott. Domination and the Arts of Resistance. Hidden Transcripts. New Haven: Yale University Press,
1990.
13
details of their lives and I doubt very much that they were not being honest when discussing their
situation. More relevant would be the case that they were just repeating the dominant discourse
without really believing it. It is of course difficult to exclude with certainty that this might be the
case. However, the adoption of the “standard” point of view emerged not only in direct discussions
of their condition, but also when discussing many other issues: from their relation to their parents,
their family and their neighbours to the school performance of their children, from their belonging
to a specific church to the political situation in their town.
The result of the hegemonic view within Brazilian society is that poor people tend to believe
that they have no possibility of modifying their situation because they lack the resources that are
necessary to attain this goal. They consider themselves to be too uneducated, too dumb, too weak,
too incapacitated to find a way out of the mess of their lives.38 They face, in Honneth’s use of the
terms, both a lack of self-esteem and lack of self-respect.39 They do not believe that they are able to
meet their own needs (not to mention the needs of their family), to develop their own talents (if they
believe they have any at all), to pursue some long-term life plan (presuming that they manage to see
their own lives in a long-term prospective). In this sense, they have no self-esteem because they
internalise a dominant discourse that individualises the responsibility of poverty and attributes its
causes to some personal fault of the poor, not to structural problems. The lack of self-esteem makes
them furthermore endure different forms of humiliation imposed on them by officials (social
workers, teachers, school directors, police officers, etc.) or by persons who exert some power on
them (shop owners, bank clerks, doctors, etc.). This leads to a lack of self-respect, with its cause in
the refusal of their social and legal equality, which is not acknowledged by those agents who
occupy a socially higher position and claim for themselves not only a privileged epistemic
standpoint, but also a superior moral status.40
Loss of self-esteem and loss of self-respect are therefore caused by forms of misrecognition,
the causes of which are social, even when they depend apparently on the individual behaviour of
some authorities or power holders. It is mostly individuals who deny them their rights, but this
happens because society condones such a denial, so that its perpetrators have nothing to fear. Quite
on the contrary, within society their attitude is justified for being grounded on the alleged moral
inferiority of the poor: they are lazy, stupid, sneaky and deserve therefore to be treated badly.
Conversely, these individuals think that their superior position of power entitles them to act as they
do towards the poor. Their personal attitude rests on a social culture that justifies both

38
See Lavinas. Percepções… and Marins. Bolsa Família…
39
Axel Honneth. The Struggle for Recognition. The Moral Grammar of Social Conflicts. Cambridge (MA): The MIT
Press, 1996.
40
Adela Cortina. Aporofobia, el rechazo al pobre. Un desafío para la democracia. Barcelona: Paidós, 2017.
14
discrimination against the poor and the very social structure that provokes and maintains poverty.
When they despise, discriminate against and humiliate the poor they act in a sense as
representatives of society. The resulting loss of self-esteem and self-respect on the poor’s part is
therefore provoked by the dominance of the epistemic standpoint of the powerful, that is, by the
way in which it explains poverty and identifies its causes in the alleged personal faults of the poor.
All these circumstances explain why it is so difficult for the Brazilian poor to understand
their condition as a result of social injustice and not of individual failure or misfortune. This has
relevant practical consequences because it represents a powerful hindrance for the poor to fight the
social causes of their poverty and because it makes it almost impossible that they come to protest or
revolt against their situation. From this point of view, epistemic oppression and the resulting lack of
confidence, self-esteem and self-respect represent forms of a second-order suffering that not only
reinforces the first-order suffering represented by poverty itself (in its material and immaterial
dimensions),41 but, at the same time, makes it difficult for the poor to have an adequate
understanding of their own condition. As long as they accept the dominant narrative and consider
their poverty to be the result of lacking individual resources, they will either sink into a state of
despair and hopelessness, or seek for the empowerment promised by churches, private educational
institutions, NGOs etc. Even when these social agents act in good faith (which is to be doubted in
some cases), they have a misleading view on poverty, which they tend to conceive of as an
individual problem that can be solved by empowering individuals, while leaving its structural
causes unchanged. To use Nancy Fraser’s vocabulary, they offer affirmative, not transformative
remedies. 42 For this reason, a critical theory of society should assume the task of deconstructing the
dominant narrative on poverty. This is not tantamount to exerting a mere critique of ideology. As
claimed above, dominant narratives are not necessarily ideological; society’s members can
genuinely believe in their validity. From this point of view, Freud’s psychoanalysis and Marx’s
analysis of ware production are good examples of what a critical theory of society should provide,
namely unmasking and debunking the socially dominant narratives that hinders social change. 43

41
On both dimensions see Peter Townsend. ‘Deprivation’, Journal of Social Policy, 16(2), 1987, p. 125-146 and
Walquíria Leão Rego; Alessandro Pinzani. Money, Autonomy and Citizenship. The Experience of the Brazilian Bolsa
Família. Dordrecht: Springer, 2019, p. 81ff.
42
Nancy Fraser; Axel Honneth. Redistribution or Recognition? A Political-Philosophical Exchange. London: Verso,
2003, p. 72ff. Transformative remedies, i.e. solutions that tackle the structural causes of poverty and introduce a real
social change, can be result only from governmental action, even if, in the case of states that are too poor to dispose on
the necessary resources, domestic governments might be seek the help of other governments or of supranational
institutions. Unfortunately, present supranational institutions like the IMF or the World Bank do not seem too keen to
endorse the policies that might be necessary to structurally overcome poverty in poor countries.
43
This had been recognized already by Jürgen Habermas in his early masterpiece Knowledge and Human Interest
(Cambridge: Polity Press, 1987).
15
They should focus on the opaque systemic suffering that haunts society44 and call the attention for
the hidden violence in society. In other words, they should fight epistemic oppression.

44
On systemic suffering see my “Systemic Suffering as a Critical Tool.”
16